Idaho Ecosystems


Standards

Idaho State Standards

Here are correlations to the Idaho State Language and Math standards and to the Idaho State Science Standards. For more information about the overall standards, see the complete Idaho Content Standards for Science, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the alignment between Idaho and NGSS Science Standards. You may also access the Idaho English Language Arts/Literacy Standards and Mathematics Standards.

Language

First Grade

ELA/Literature 1.W-RW.1

Routinely write or dictate writing for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences (e.g., expressing a view or preference, supplying some information about the topic, stories that recount an event or tell a story).

Suggested Content

Look at the plants and animals shown under each Idaho ecosystem. Write a sentence about your favorite animal and your favorite plant. Tell why you like them.

Third Grade

ELA/Literacy 3.W-RW.4

Write personal or fictional stories that recount an event or experience, include details to develop the characters or event(s), and provide a sense of closure.

Suggested Lesson

Write a story about the time you were lost in the desert or the mountains. What did you do to survive until you were rescued? Use names of plants and animals found in that ecosystem in your story. Caution!! Some plants are poisonous.

Fifth Grade

ELA/Literacy 5.W-RW.3

Write informational texts that introduce the topic; develop the focus with relevant facts, details, and examples from multiple sources that are logically grouped, including headings to support the purpose; and provide a concluding section.

Suggested Lesson

Write about Idaho's ecosystems. Tell what makes each one the way it is. Include weather, altitude, geologic formations, and other physical characteristics.

Math

First Grade

Math 1.MD.C.4

Organize, represent, and interpret data with up to three categories; ask and answer questions about the total number of data points, how many in each category, and how many more or less are in one category than in another.

Suggested Lesson

Compare the average rainfall for the area where you live. Do you live in a forest? A desert? Grassland? How do you know?

Fourth Grade

Math 4.MD.A.2

Use the four operations to solve word problems involving measurements. Include problems involving simple fractions or decimals. Include problems that require expressing measurements given in a larger unit in terms of a smaller unit.

Suggested Lesson

Write mathematical equations using data from Idaho Forest Products. Solve and label.

Fifth Grade

Math 5.MD.B.2

Collect, represent, and interpret numerical data, including whole numbers, and fractional and decimal values. Interpret numerical data, with whole-number values, represented with tables or line plots. Use graphic displays of data (line plots (dot plots), tables, etc.) to solve real-world problems using fractional data. For example, given different measurements of liquid in identical beakers, find the amount of liquid each beaker would contain if the total amount in all the beakers were redistributed equally.

Suggested Lesson

Write fractional statements using data from Idaho Forest Products.

Science

Kindergarten

Earth and Space Science: K-ESS-1.2

With guidance and support, use evidence to construct an explanation of how plants and animals interact with their environment to meet their needs.

Supporting Content

Plants and animals can change their environment. Examples of plants and animals changing their environment could include a squirrel digging in the ground to hide its food and that tree roots can break concrete.

Earth and Space Science: K-ESS-2.1

Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants and animals and the places they live.

Supporting Content

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Examples of relationships could include that deer eat buds and leaves, therefore, they usually live in forested areas; and, grasses need sunlight so they often grow in meadows. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Earth and Space Science: K-ESS-2.3

Communicate ideas that would enable humans to interact in a beneficial way with the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment.

Supporting Content

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things. Designs can be conveyed through sketches, drawings, or physical models. These representations are useful in communicating ideas for a problem’s solutions to other people. Examples of human influence on the land could include planting trees after a burn, protecting farm fields from erosion, or keeping plastic trash out of waterways.

Second Grade

Life Science: 2-LS-2.1

Make observations of plants and animals to compare the diversity of life in different habitats.

Supporting Content

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water. The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Third Grade

Life Science: 3-LS-3.2

Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.

Supporting Content

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. The environment affects the traits that an organism develops. Characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning. Examples of the environment affecting a trait could include that normally tall plants grown with insufficient water are stunted, and a pet dog that is given too much food and little exercise may become overweight.

Fourth Grade

Earth and Space Science: 4-ESS-3.1

Obtain and combine information to describe that energy and fuels are derived from natural resources and their uses affect the environment.

Supporting Content

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural sources, and their use affects the environment in multiple ways. Examples of environmental effects could include negative biological impacts of wind turbines, erosion due to deforestation, loss of habitat due to dams or surface mining, and air pollution from burning of fossil fuels.

Life Science: 4.LS.1.1

Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.

Supporting Content

Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction. Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc. Examples of structures could include heart, stomach, lung, brain, and skin. 

Fifth Grade

Earth and Space Systems: 5-ESS-3.1

Obtain and combine information about ways communities protect Earth's resources and environment using scientific ideas.

Supporting Content

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

Life Science: 5-LS-2.3

Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.

Supporting Content

Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, temperature, food, and other organisms. When the environment changes in ways that affect a place's physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Life Science: 5-LS-2.2

Construct an argument with evidence for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.

Supporting Content

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. Sometimes the differences in characteristics between individuals of the same species provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing. Examples of cause and effect relationships could be that plants that have larger thorns than other plants may be less likely to be eaten by predators, and animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

Sixth Grade - Middle School

Earth and Space Science: MS-ESS-3.3

Apply scientific practices to design a method for monitoring human activity and increasing beneficial human influences on the environment.

Supporting Content

Human activities can have consequences on the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species. Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase. Examples of the design process include examining human environmental impacts, assessing the kinds of solutions that are feasible, and designing and evaluating solutions that could reduce that impact. Examples of human impacts can include water usage (such as the withdrawal of water from streams and aquifers or the construction of dams and levees), land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, or the removal of wetlands), and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Life Science: MS-LS-2.6

Design and evaluate solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Supporting Content

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth’s terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem’s biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. Changes in biodiversity can influence humans’ resources, such as food, energy, and medicines, as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on—for example, water purification and recycling. There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem. Examples of ecosystem services could include water purification, nutrient recycling, and prevention of soil erosion. Examples of design solution constraints could include scientific, economic, and social considerations.

Life Science: MS-LS-2.5

Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.

Supporting Content

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations. Emphasis is on recognizing patterns in data and making warranted inferences about changes in populations, and on evaluating empirical evidence supporting arguments about changes to ecosystems.

Life Science: MS-LS-2.4

Develop a model to describe the flow of energy through the trophic levels of an ecosystem.

Supporting Content

Food webs can be broken down into multiple energy pyramids. Concepts should include biomass transfer between trophic levels and the environment. Emphasis is on describing the transfer of mass and energy beginning with producers, moving to primary and secondary consumers, and ending with decomposers.

Life Science: MS-LS-2.3

Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.

Supporting Content

Emphasis is on describing the conservation of matter and flow of energy into and out of various ecosystems, and on defining the boundaries of the system. Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.

Life Science: MS-LS-2.2

Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.

Supporting Content

Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

Life Science: MS-LS-2.1

Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.

Supporting Content

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.